I recently discovered to my dismay that eBay has eliminated wildcard searches. In other words, before if I wanted to search for all Greek coins from the 1800s, I could search for 18* and they would come up. Now I have to enter each individual date. This can make it seriously harder to search for coins on eBay if you are searching for a range of dates and not just one thing. From what I've read, eBay got a new database that couldn't handle wildcards, so they decided to try to spin it as improving the search experience. Nice try.
I didn't know you could do that. Well, used to be able to do that. I would guess that with the zillions of listings it would take a lot of computer horsepower to search that much data, if a lot of people were doing it. I think that's why some bulletin boards, not sure if this one does, limits you to once search every xx seconds.
Not only that but there is that very annoying "outbid" pop up every time you look at your current bids. I hate that thing.
I don't like the changes to the browsing/searching that they made recently. It seems so much less efficient.
I'm thinking the wildcard was merely changed. I think it you type in "18" instead of "18*" you'll get all the 1800s to populate.
They changed up their entire search system to be "smarter" so they don't think the wildcard is necessary for us anymore. Well of course it doesn't work as well and isn't really an improvement. I used the wildcard searches regularly and now don't even bother searching for certain items because it would be too time consuming to find them with the multiple searches it would take. I also noticed their new search gives bad results when searching for things that were never an issue before. For example, when you search "1962 proof quarter" you should only get items with those words in the title... but that is no longer the case. Sure you get mostly 1962 proof quarters, but now you'll also see a couple of 1993 proof quarters in the results, and a 1962 proof franklin as well... I really wish eBay would stop "improving" things, but that'll never happen...
Well, most databases don't use wildcards for searching and all databases can handle searching. What likely happened is they've had so many page layout changes which meant a lot of code changes that perhaps wildcard searches were slowing the system down, which they can. Could also be such code changes that made the wildcard search unusable within their code. But none of us will ever know the real reason unless you're likely on their development and test teams that test their new code releases on their website, but I doubt it was because they got a new "database" as they likely have many databases for many parts of their site. They likely have a database just for searching.
I think a lot of problems I run into relate to the fact that coins are different from a lot of other things people buy and sell on eBay, so a lot of eBay's policies which make sense for a lot of things people sell on there really don't work for coins. Like when you sell coins it wants you to always search the product catalog. That makes sense for a lot of things but is not very useful for coins, since every coin is different.
I HATE their new search software. Here's a few reasons why: I search for a specific word in the title only and the results will contain auctions that do not have that keyword in the title. I think they are trying to show auctions that have words related to the search term in the results, even when there are thousands of auctions that do match the search term. I can see if my search contained five words and they showed some that only contained four of the five words, but c'mon, when I search for "Silver" in the "title only", and I get auctions that have nothing to do with silver, and they aren't even "featured" auctions, there's something wrong. Especially when FeeBay probably considers "Plated" and "Clad" to be related to "Silver". Another reason: You used to be able to browse by category, now it seems hit or miss. Sometimes you have to enter at least one search word, which is silly if the results contain auctions that don't even have that word. Yet another reason: You can't search for items using only negatives anymore. I used to search categories for items that were filtered only by "-plated -clad -"German silver" etc" You can't do that anymore, you have to enter at least one term to search for. This used to be a great way to find auctions that had misspelled words and would be overlooked by most people. I think they already did away with this, but for a while when you were searching for items, you'd see some Amazon like results that said "500GB Hard Drives - 5,524 items starting at $0.99" and it was a pain in the butt to drill down to find the individual auctions. As if all 500GB hard drives are the same and as if they were actually going to sell for $0.99. Not even all Seagate 500GB hard drives are the same. Or even all 7200 RPM Seagate 500GB hard drives. And of course all sellers aren't the same. FeeBay used to be a really good place to buy specific hard drives when you needed parts for data recovery. It is still one of the better places, but the searching has absolutely gotten much more difficult. I'm starting to get the feeling that FeeBay is trying to be like a supermarket. You go to the supermarket to buy milk and you have to go to the back of the store to get it. The marketing strategy behind this is that the store wants to expose you to as much of their product as possible, so they don't place the most commonly purchased staples near the door. You have to walk past all the sales, and impluse items, and ice cream and whatever to pick up a gallon of milk. I used to think it was based on logistics, especially with milk and stocking the shelves from the rear, but my marketing professor expressly told us that it is 100% based on marketing. Do you think FeeBay is trying to do the same thing? Expose us to more "impulse items"?
Blaubart, you make good points in the last paragraph. EBay definitely wants to make you buy more, and they want to get sellers to pay for more expensive marketing options so that their listings show up more often. I find that I can still find what I'm looking for, it just is harder in some ways than it used to be or needs to be.
